Casey was late.
After a while I heard voices raised inside their house. I'd never had
the illusion that they were a happy family. On the other hand, I'd
never heard them fighting, either.
I checked my watch. Ten minutes after seven. The movie started at
eight. It would take us half an hour to drive to Trescott. It was
going to be tight, but we'd still have a little leeway.
(waited. I didn't mind waiting. There was no temptation to turn on
the radio. I'd always liked the evening quiet of Dead River. It was
one thing the town had to offer, a kind of gentle cooling of the spirit
that comes along with the cooling of the land. The summer nights were
almost worth the winter nights, when you suffered, housebound, through
the cold. You could almost feel the stars come out, without seeing
them.
I was eased back, sitting low in the seat, dreaming.
I jumped when I heard the door slam.
There was no light on in front of the house, so it was hard to see her
face at first as she came toward the car, but I could tell from
something in her walk, in the way she moved, that she was upset. Her
movements were always so controlled and confident, made up of loose and
well-toned muscle. But now, I saw a rough abruptness about her that I
wasn't used to. She pulled the door open on the passenger side.
"Drive."
She launched herself into the seat. Her voice seemed thicker, angry.
"Yes. I don't care. Anywhere. Fuck it!"
I think she took a good five years off the life of my car door. My
ears rattled in tandem with the window. I started the car.
"Easy."
She turned to me, and something took a dive in the pit of my stomach.
Those lovely pale eyes gleamed at me. I'd never seen her cry before. I
started to reach for her, to comfort her.
"Please!"
She was begging.
Casey, begging. I couldn't quite believe it at first.
I did what she asked. I drove.
"What's up?"
"Please just drive."
"You still want the movie?"
I'll don't know where we went.
The outskirts of town for a while, then up and down the main
I tried to get her to talk about it, but she shut me up with a look so
painful that I kept my own eyes fixed to the road ahead after that and
gave her the long quiet that was clearly all she wanted from me and all
I had to give. I felt her body shaking gently and knew she was crying.
It astonished me that anything could happen in that colorless, moneyed,
lifeless household that could possibly make her cry. It astonished me
that she should cry at all, I think. The command was gone, the
toughness melted away, and beside me was a woman like any other. And
even though I liked that toughness and that command, I realized I'd
been waiting a longtime to see this, to see what was underneath.
It was good to know I could help her just by being there. I felt oddly
comforted. I'd never cared for her more.
It was quite a moment.
I remember we'd turned onto Northfield Avenue when I felt her
straighten up beside me. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her
wipe the tears off her face. It was a single harsh gesture with the
fingertips of both hands. I heard her sniffling back the mucus and
heard her clear her throat. We turned to one another at the same time.
For me it was just a glance before I had to look back to the road
again. But I felt her stare on me long after that, measuring me
somehow.
When she spoke, her voice was gentle, but I sensed that she'd turned a
corner again, and what lay beneath it was not. I'd seen a crack in the
wall, no more than that. Her voice ran drifts of ectoplasm over me
like the thin, strong lines of a spider.
"I want to go back."
"You want me to take you home?"
"Please. Yes."
"All right."
We weren't far from there. We drove in silence. I turned onto her
street and noticed a pothole in the road I hadn't seen when we'd
IDE AND SEEK
passed it before. It seemed out of place on that one good street in
all Dead River.
I parked across from her house and put the pickup in parking gear. It
rumbled: the idle was running high again. I put my arm across the seat
and turned to ask her if she wouldn't like to tell me about it before
she went inside again. I wanted to know. It wasn't just curiosity.
She was putting me through some very fast changes. I felt she'd cut me
off again, done it quickly and thoroughly, and I wanted back in. She
opened the curbside door.
"Wait for me here."
She closed the door carefully, quietly.
I turned off the car and watched her.
She crossed the street and walked up the field stone path that cut the
lawn in two and led up to the porch. There were low shrubs planted in
a rock garden roughly as deep as the porch on either side. They
ascended in height, the symmetry almost too neat to please the eye. She
stopped in front of the first step and looked off to her left. She was
looking for something on the ground.
Now what the hell?
She took a few steps to the left and kept on looking. I had the
ridiculous momentary impression that it was night crawlers she was
after. That we were going fishing. She bent down into the garden and
took something up in each hand, seeming to weigh them before she stood
again.
From that point on her movements were completely economical. The Casey
I was used to, and even more so.
It was clear that she knew exactly what she was doing. She took three
steps backward onto the lawn and looked up into the left front window.
There was a light burning inside from a floor lamp. I tried to
remember the layout of the house, and I thought it would have to be the
den, her father's workroom.
There is something terrible to me about the sound of breaking
I remember we had a cat when I was a kid who woke us all one night by
knocking a cheap cut-glass vase off the kitchen table. I was on my
feet and into the kitchen so fast that I wasn't fully awake when
I got there. With the result that the sole of my foot took seven or
eight stitches.
That's how it was this time too.
I think my hand was on the ignition as soon as her rock went crashing
through the window. I think the car was in drive and my foot on the
brake before the shattering sound even left my ears. Part of it was
instinct, part of it self-preservation.
It was her house. But I had the feeling it would be my ass.
My throat felt constricted.
"Jesus!" I yelled. "Come on!"
Somehow I couldn't get her attention.
She was still moving in that same determined way across the field stone
path and then across the right side of her lawn, ignoring me. I knew
instantly what she was doing, where she was going. I knew it like I
knew how my head would hurt if you hit it with a hammer. There would
be no stopping her. Calling out would only make it worse. The sound
of breaking glass had been so loud I half expected to see porch lights
go on all along the street. But everything was still quiet. As she
marched across the lawn and over a macadam driveway to the house next